Garage48 goes BOOM

This weekend Garage48 Defence Makeathon takes place at University of Tartu Institute of Physics. We’re happy to announce that we are completely sold out, and we had more participation requests than we’re able to fit into Institute of Physics!

Defence Makeathon has gathered together over 170 bright-minded professionals from different backgrounds and places like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, United States, Japan, Turkey, Jamaica etc to pick their brains and come up with whole new solutions to tackle the challenges of defence in the 21st century. What can be a daunting task alone, could be easily done together! It’s going to be a legendary event!

What are some of our mentors thinking about the Garage48 Defence Makeathon?

“In the end, forming teams and bringing together people with different skill sets, so they could connect and share their experiences, is more important than the ideas that are brought up here,”said Jaak Tarien, Director of the Tallinn-based NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence

Tauri Tuubel, co-founder and CTO on Defendec added “Traditionally defence market has lots of regulations and long sales cycles. It is nice to see that there starts to be mind-shift. State of technology enables more agile and faster development, and maybe we can have fewer regulations and shorter time to market?”.

Uku Särekanno, Deputy Director General of the Information System Authority, said that “An excellent event! You can sum the whole event up with the legendary “get the shit done!” quote. Things must be executed quickly, and for the customers. That is an attitude that would also suit the Estonian state, and the Estonian Information System Authority is one of those institutions, where the work environment looks pretty similar to a hackathon.”

The event is organised by Garage48, Estonian Ministry of Defence, Estonian Defence Forces, Estonian National Defence College and Estonian Defence Industry Association.

Historically, the defence industry has led the way in research and development with industrial, commercial, and general public interests benefiting as various innovations become available to the rest of the world.

The hackathon brings together engineers and specialists from the defence sector, connecting them with students, developers, engineers and other experts from the civilian field in order to raise the awareness and knowledge about this specific, mysterious, but critically important field. Our goal is to attract new and ambitious talent and to develop innovative product concepts which could one day help defend our country. Garage48 Defence Hackathon is a perfect place for Baltics and Scandinavian military and defence schools to mix and mingle, share their expertise with civil experts and students and find new ways to cooperate in the future.